So Much Activity!
Posted March 17, 2021 by Sarah Callanan
The past few weeks have been super busy and jam-packed full of activity! I’ve attended two conferences and one workshop, and that’s in addition to school and work since my last post!
First, I attended Professor Kathy Wisser’s Literature Review Workshop over Zoom. This workshop was incredibly useful for my final project in LIS 621, as one of the components is a literature review. I have written a literature review before in LIS 475, but I feel much more prepared to write this one, especially after attending the workshop. Hearing Professor Wisser clearly define the steps of the literature review and learning about concept mapping tools and matrices was especially helpful!
Next, I attended NEASIS&T Annual 2021, It Took a Pandemic: Reinventing Libraries in an Era of Change. This was an all-day conference held over Zoom on March 5, 2021. This was actually the first virtual conference that I have attended in its entirety live—for the two previous virtual conferences I’ve attended, ALA Annual 2020 and ALA Midwinter 2021, I attended the majority of the sessions by watching them on-demand. Here’s a description of the conference, “Since Spring 2020, libraries and other information science institutions have had to transform many existing practices and services to continue to meet the needs of their patrons and communities in the midst of the global pandemic. While the past year has brought immense challenges to our institutions, it has also provided opportunities to reexamine practices, provide innovative new services, and to collaborate with one another.” I learned so much from attending this conference and participating in the different sessions and breakout rooms. Highlights of the conference for me were Elaine Martin’s keynote Library Leadership in a Time of Crises, the Simmons Student Chapter of ASIS&T-sponsored panel on how the panelists’ libraries adapted and changed their services throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and Dr. Mega Subramaniam and Linda W. Braun’s presentation Essential Research Needed: The Role of Public Libraries Before, During, and After Crises. Aside from the fact that this is such an interesting topic, one of the main reasons why I attended this conference is because of my LIS 621 project. My group’s topic is Public Library Services in the Greater Boston Area during the COVID-19 Pandemic, so attending this conference was incredibly helpful for the research for the project. Also, it was great to support students and faculty at SLIS who were involved with the conference! The Simmons Student Chapter of ASIS&T has a great recap of the Simmons community involvement in the conference if you want to see it here.
Finally, last week I attended Open Texas 2021: Adoption, Engagement, & Impact. This conference was held virtually March 11-12, 2021 and was hosted by University of Houston-Downtown, Houston Community College, and Houston Area OER. This conference was all about open educational resources! I attended this conference because one of my colleagues at work encouraged me to. Learning more about open educational resources has been so fascinating—a few of the sessions that I found particularly interesting were Ins and Outs of Publicly Available Resources: Traversing the OER Landscape and How Would You Teach if Copyright Wasn’t in the Way? Reimagining Open Education with the Best Practices in Fair Use and Fair Dealing for Open Education. A lot of the sessions (including the two I mentioned) were recorded and are available on the conference website if you are interested in learning about open educational resources—you can see the sessions here.
As you can see, the semester is starting to get really busy! Next time, I’ll tell you all about registration! Stay tuned!